Metamorphoses
by KendrixTermina
Summary: The Voltron Cast vs. the Concept of Change. Character Study. Our familiar story told as a series of transformations.


**I. (Rapunzel)**

"You will become me.

Or rather, I will become you, won't I? So please, take good care of me."

When she was a little girl, her father and brother would come home smelling of stories and stardust, and she would be what they saw when they dreamed of home.

When they returned, she'd be standing in the doorway, she'd be an image of timelessness, waiting in an old-fashioned dress with a freckled, playful smile and long hair curling down her shoulders, and when they were away, she would dream of the places they had gone to, working through heaps of books to feed her never-ending curiosity, and taking notes of as-of-yet unanswered questions to question them about when they came home –

And though her thoughts penetrated some of the furthest reaches of creation, it was a small and simple world she lived in, seldom venturing very far beyond her parents' home as the days passed her by, and she would have thought that perhaps she was suited to the more intellectual or conceptual kind of journey, probing the stars as best as she could recreate them in her mind as she kept dreaming through the noise.

As the youngest of the family, she was their precious little dreamer, and a matter of course, they had high aspirations for her, but it was all part of the warmth and fondness that they had all cradled her in for most of their lives.

Held in their collective laps, she was raised with kindness and stories, surrounded by people who expected and wanted her to succeed, supported by a close-knit family that wanted nothing more than to see her happy – and though she might have realized that she was in some ways different from her peers or even the older students she found herself surrounded with after skipping a few grades, she rarely felt lonely or outcast, not when she knew exactly where she belonged, just another chip of the block of the illustrious Holt family.

So, when her father and brother announced that they were to go on another pioneering mission to the far reaches of their solar system, it almost had a sense of normalcy to it, at last in the particular sense of 'normal' that was particular to their unique household – She was obviously very proud of them and inspired by their example, but in a sense, they were not only going on an uncertain, titanic undertaking that would advance the progress of humanity, but simply leaving for what their everyday job happened to be.

Any sense of unease that might still have been left in her belly after so many years of seeing them come and go would have been sublimated into a sense of excitement –

This was simply the way of her world, their family's cherished and private sense of normal.

And so, her world was inevitably shattered when half of her family was lost to the void – now, different people had different ways of dealing with grief.

Some raged, some retreated and some would avoid the subject or the circumstance, wondering how anyone could have the mind left to be concerned with technical details at this point... but Pidge was the opposite of that.

When she was small, she would recoil from the sights of crawling insect, slimy amphibians and even the weeds that would poke through every crevice of the sidewalk in spring, as if to burst the bounds of her familiar world and lead the charge to overrun it alongside all things that were wild and gross; She shuddered at the thought of being pricked with needles and her head would spin in the midst of swirling crowds of children.

But then her father explained to her about the use of vaccines and how the worms created the soil that grew her food, and she learned to tell that all those spiders were not all poisonous, and armed with the gloves of knowledge, she would not hesitate to touch any thing, because she understood that there was no danger.

Knowing how things happened and why they must happen gave her a sense of closure and control, a secure bastion from which to engage the world with confidence, and when the very people who had supported her throughout her first steps into the world had been ripped away from her, she fell back onto those same mechanisms.

She had to know, even if it was just for the sake of catharsis, she needed to know, now more than ever, or she would never find peace.

Even despite her youth she was aware that grief could cloud one's senses and saw the need to abstract from one's subjectivity in order to see clear – So when she began to see the first signs that things weren't adding up, she approached that hypothesis with as much skepticism as any other.

On the one hand, she wanted to know every last detail in order to know what exactly her family's last moments may have been like, perhaps beyond what it was possible to know, because she wanted it to be over and her doubt to be silenced, but on the other side, she understood that she may be tempted to cling to the tiniest discrepancies for a shred of theoretical hope that they igt be alive, stranded like the unlikely survivors of a modern-day shipwreck or hidden away safely in some fantastical place.

But more terrifying than accepting her on bias and the loss of her loved ones was the screeching suspicion that crept up at her the more things just refused to add up, to degrees that she could no longer explain away or possibly be making up, and it began to occur to her that she might never know, and though she knew of the importance of reserving judgment, the prospect of never even pursuing the question beyond what the garrison's reports would tell her was impossible to accept;

If nothing else, the details of the incident where a diffuse cloud in her head, and she'd need to see all of the raw evidence for herself in order to make up her own mind in a manner that would truly make sense of what happened in a satisfactory manner, beyond what she could extract from the tinted, lensed, biased and possibly incomplete words of others.

And eventually, those were the needs that lead her to the day she would be standing in front of a mirror, ready to discard her beloved long hair and doff the cherished name that her father had given her.

Sure, she knew that it was all an artifice to hide her identity, but here's something that was not: She'd always had a playful and inquisitive personality, yet now, she was driven by a torrent of a steely, defiant boldness that she'd never know before – maybe this was the onset of adulthood, or perhaps, he had simply been spared any circumstance dire enough to bring this out so far, and she'd simply just found out this truth about herself, how she'd be willing to go to the ends of the earth in pursuit of answers, even if it was just her against the world.

This could have been a scar left by the disruption of her once idyllic peaceful life, or perhaps, Pidge Gunderson had always been a potential statue stashed away within the marble block that had been Katie Holt.

Locking eyes with her reflection, she wondered if perhaps Katie had been lost somewhere with her family, or left behind with her mother, and whether she could possibly be found. Or maybe Pidge would outgrow her, like an old favorite dress from childhood.

She sincerely hoped that there would be something left of Katie by the time she got to reunite with her family, but even more, she hoped that there would be something left of her father and brother for Pidge to find, but even if there wasn't, she had to go, because of all the many, any books that lined the shelves of the Holt residence, not a single one could tell her the story of what happened to her family, and while all that knowledge may have prepared her to an extent, but there came a point where she'd have to take the forward plunge into the unknown if she ever wanted to expand upon what her books could not yet answer, and that moment could no longer be delayed, even if it meant that there might be no turning back.

 **II. (Werewolf)**

….

"I wonder how the person I will become in the future will look back at the person I am now.

I wonder how the person I was would look at me. Would they be disappointed? Would they understand?"

….

Long, long ago, before he lost all sense of time, he thinks he had come tumbling down a rabbit hole of madness and desecration.

He thinks there had been something else before, some different world that was now little more but a faded dream, far beyond the warped amalgam of horror movies that encompassed his waking days now.

Somewhere in between the first time he had killed a viscous best twice his size in an act of desperate self-defense and the time they opened up his body and, over the course of their handiwork, discarded good-sized chunks of it to be disposed of as medical waste, some lever on the clockwork of his mind had been cranked up to overdrive and broken off, staying stuck as it were in the creaking layers of ancient genetic programing, somewhere, around the time days melted into nights in the light-less dark decks of ships and stations, and though he knows this, it's seldom more than the faintest presence at the back of his consciousness, the corresponding synapses and connections in his mind nothing more than a convoluted thread that his train of thought occasionally stumbled over, a disused, abandoned set of patterns that almost seemed to belong to a different person, a different survival strategy adapted for a different time, far from this delirium of pain, steel and howling that he cannot seem to wake up from for even a moment, lest his head be removed from his shoulders in the instant his mind left it to stray to different realms.

He thinks, sometimes, as distantly as one thinks of a favorite childhood fairytale, that there was once a young man named Takashi Shirogane.

There is the presence of comrades and the pronounced stab at guilt when he realizes anew that he long since lost sight of them; There are colors, smells and sounds that now seem so alien and strange that he can hardly make sense of it; There is honest marvel at the peace of the star-spangled void, and wonder so pure that even all this defilement did not manage to taint it; Sometimes, on the rare occasions that he strains to remember, he can even recall the faint, faceless ghosts of parents and a single brother, and the crisp image of a sullen, unruly youth who might as well have been a second one.

Though celebrated, acclaimed and beloved by many, the man was a humble, put-together person who saw his dedication to his work and his sense of responsibility as the least he could to, and pervading and suffusing it all, there is an incomplete, simplistic sense of the world as a just and ordered place where declaring that you come in peace doesn't get you bashed over the head and taken apart on a table as you struggle in vain for the privilege of screaming or even the sweet release of unconsciousness.

Because he longed for order, he tended to create it around himself just by existing, always upright, presentable and ever in-control, and perhaps that's why the people around him had often seen him as a natural leader, fearfully clinging to the islands of control and stability that emerged around him, but whoever he had been, his concepts and ideas of who he was had been ripped from their context, rendered meaningless and blown wide open, much like the flesh-machine that they ran on had been altered, tampered and tampered with –

There was, after all, very little that he could control or direct about his current circumstances. He lives or dies as the leisure of capricious masters, and his days are a blur of iron bars, leather straps and the imprints of rayguns pressed to his temples.

He clings to what he can get, of course. Strapped down with nothing to think about but the horror that awaits him again and again, he traces the patterns of the robot guards. He tries, if possible, to keep other prisoners from their deaths. He struggles again and again to win fights and concoct strategies to defeat even stronger and ever more monstrous though he doesn't really know why.

He scrambles to survive, but he couldn't for the life of him tell you what he's surviving for.

It's not even so much a coping mechanism as a purely mechanical behavior, a self-preservation instinct he doesn't have the will or energy to defy – Between all the fights and experiments, he doesn't even find the time to ponder about meanings, goals or other things that would be situated far higher on Maslow's pyramid of needs.

He comes to know that the process of breaking is not shattering all at once and then existing as unknowing, giggling pieces, but taking more and more punishment as one continuously scrambled to keep going, struggling ever more as all that he was kept warping and bending all around the duct-taped pieces of his shattered ego.

There was no finish line, or final breaking point, or sudden relief; There were only attempts to master one day after another, with varying degrees of success.

He' made of wires and metal now, but most of all, he's keenly aware that even his much-abused flesh is a kind of mechanism, as are the disjointed circuits of the squishy pink mass inside his head; All all times, he scans his surroundings in the manner of a beast, alarms blaring, neurotransmitters flooding, all consciousness rerouted and distorted into an ever-adapting algorithm for avoiding death, a race he doesn't actually think he's ever going to win, for he has no hope, no allies and no expectations of any future.

His cruel overlords may see him as little more than a primitive savage fit to be mangled for their personal amusement, but once upon a time, on the rare occasions when he has the slightest bits of choice or agency in the outcome of any manner, whenever there's something to protect, he feels the echo of this lost pioneer who was, in many ways, a particularly civilized creature, reasonable, stoic, even noble.

Once, responsibility and reason where who he was, but for a person for that to exist, and have it all ripped away from him, only to be thrust into this brutal, violent world of carnage, where those things had little room to exist –

That's what it meant to taste of devastation.

The last thing he ever expected to happen was to be set free and make his escape, let alone to return to earth and go on to be part of an even greater destiny, leaving this blurry, hideous part of his life to be just one of many stages and facets that formed his being.

That young, idealistic astronaut was wounded, marred and sobered, but he was very much still there, and he couldn't help bubbling to the surface when he saw Keith again, all concerned, marginally taller and smelling of desert sand.

He could, to some degree, slip into his old patterns until the blurry days of his captivity seemed to be the dream, but the marks on his body reminded him every day that it had been very real, and ever so often, the shadows from those lost, molten days would rear their ugly heads.

With the benefit of some distance he could now see that he was much more than the violence of that hellish voyage, but even so, the bared, naked instinct of that desperate gladiator was a part of him now.

Once, he liked to keep order, but now, all his perceptions would melt into an overwhelming gale of blaring alarm bells if he didn't keep his surroundings under tight control – intellectually, he understood that next anyone would have incurred some sort scars under these circumstances, but the specific ways in which the patterns of his mind and body had fractured and eroded were so inextricably linked to the things he valued and the choices he made that it was sometimes next to impossible to separate himself from the experience, and he wasn't fully sure if he could, or even should.

He just knew that these cadets and the Princess needed him now, so he'd have to do his best to become what this situation demanded and... keep surviving.

 **III. (Sleeping Beauty)**

….

"The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all

But sometimes it's better to be the Dandelion, which can take root anywhere it lands."

….

It was a rough awakening, to say the very least –

One moment she was arguing with her father, still speechless and reeling from an unbelievable betrayal that had yet to quite sink in, and the next, her life as she knew it was irrevocably over.

Before she could reach out her arms and protest any further, the cryopod's covering had closed down on her and stopped the path of her palms as they reached for her father, and before the next tick had come to pass, its mechanisms had already begun to slow down the processes of her life, trapping her between one heartbeat and the next for the eternities to go, her life preserved as potential energy, some purely hypothetical state of continuing for a frozen shell without consciousness, and she must have stood there, like a statue, physically there but absent in mind. For seasons and ages, the stars kept drifting and the planets kept turning,as layers of snow, autumn leaves and sediments had covered the castle.

When she awoke, the world as she knew it and almost everybody in it, everything and everyone she'd ever known had not merely died, but vanished from most of living memory, and the vile creatures that had destroyed them all had spread out across the universe like a plague, splattering the star maps with atrocity and subjugation, akin to the demons in the legends of old – In the span of time since her world had been devastated and most of her people breathed their last, entire civilizations had risen and fallen; When she awoke, she found herself surrounded by strange creatures in subdued colors with odd-looking, stubby ears. She'd never seen the likes of them before, and indeed, she couldn't have – from what they'd told her, their civilization, if it could have been called that, had barely discovered agriculture by the time she'd gone into stasis.

Since the moment she'd awakened, not a single day had passed in which she didn't think of yet another person who must have died by then, sometimes just an attendant she'd only spoken to a few times, or a handful of citizens she had used to see around the capital; She'd look back at creatures and places that no longer existed, entire civilizations that may since have fallen into ruin, the tiniest details, associations and rites she had always taken for granted that were now forgotten by everyone but herself and Coran...

And whenever she thought of all this, really, truly considering the extent of its meaning and letting its implications sink in, the claws of despair would dig at her from the inside as if she were a hollow shell, and she would feel so, so small, and so terribly alone in this cold and enormous universe.

But even then, she could not give up, because she was Princess Allura of Altea, heir of a legacy much older than herself, and bearer of much greater duties, obligations that had once been her father's, who had not only been a king, but a defender of the universe.

Her enemies might well think her cornered and powerless, but she hailed from a world of mountain peaks and challenges, where enormous creatures prowled, rocks rained from the sky, and even the smallest children were taught how to defend themselves – Not to speak of the royalty that would one day have been expected to protect their people as a whole, had it not been for their untimely demise.

The citizens of Altea had been a hardly lot and that same, fierce steel very much lived on in the tower of the Princess' spine, tempered by the heat of her fury – but in addition to their natural strength and versatility, her people's strength had always laid with their wisdom and diplomacy, the technological marvels they had created and their belief in peace and the future, and no one had embodied those qualities more than her own father, whose actions had united the surrounding system into an alliance that had heralded and era of peace and prosperity across many star systems and held strong until Zarkon's vile betrayal struck at its heart.

As one of the last ones, as the last one left that could continue her father's mission, her actions would determine her people's final legacy forever...

So, she did not give up, simply because she could not, because she had been left with no other available options.

Pushing her pain beneath her queenly mask, she set out to act in accordance with what limited resources she had and what codes and principles she could afford to keep up, and there may have been the occasional moment where Coran reminded her that her father would have objected to the harshness of her methods, she was the last one now, and she could not afford to waver – and if she had to make do with these odd strangers that had awoken her, then so be it.

She keenly felt the enormous weight of the universe on her bag, perhaps more so than these young travelers who could not even fathom its vastness at this moment, sensed each of her vertebrae almost buckling under the terrifying load, but if she would not bear it, then who else was there?

She was the last, and whatever part of her had still been an outdoorsy young girl who had loved wearing sparkly jewelry and playing in the flower fields was locked away behind armor, an exoskeleton of practiced habit and years of training that sustained her from the inside, pieced together from her stiff upper lip on one end, her command voice on another and yet another shielded by the regal encouraging speeches of her aristocratic manners, and so armed, she set to work at whipping these would-be recruits into shape, moving forward in any way she could.

Of course, that girl from back then still lived somewhere, at first mostly in her chambers or in the seclusion of her hologram room, or perhaps in the company of her small animal companions, and, with the passage of time, the new Paladins became her comrades, and even more than that, they became her friends, as well as the closest thing she now had to a family.

Sometimes, on good days, when the sky was clear, she would even find herself letting down her walls in their presence and laughing earnestly in their midst – but most of the time, she had duties to attend to, things that no one else could do.

And to that end, she would stop at nothing, she would become whatever was needed for this undertaking to succeed and take many forms in the process, be it a determined leader, a nasty drill sergeant or a graceful diplomat, a paladin or a mage.

There would be no more Alteans after herself and Coran passed away, but if she could manage to end Zarkon's tyranny and unite the liberated peoples under a much greater, further-reaching rebirth of her father's alliance, that might just be considered a legacy worthy of both the people of Altea and their late king.

 **IV. (Hobbit)**

….

"She told me: "In a sense, your fate is already sealed, and for that, I am sorry. If you will continue to exist at all, it will not be as you are now"

And there I sat, painfully aware of the ephemeral sets of habits and preferences that constituted me as a person."

….

Shiro had seen the threat with his own eyes and barely managed to escape them, Allura had her father's legacy to live up to, Pidge had been looking for her family, and for all their differences, Keith and Lance had both been looking for a greater purpose with no small degree of desperation, Hunk would not actually have minded if his life had gone on just the way it was –

He was no stranger to adventure, curiosity or creativity (after all, he's signed on for a space exploration program), but his preferred way of engaging with those things was from a safe distance, on his own terms, with both feet on solid ground.

He was pretty satisfied with both himself and his life as it was, if it wasn't for the occasional embarrassing flight simulations, and he knew to appreciate its simple pleasures and the people in surroundings, and, at the risk of sounding like various cartoon bears, he thought he could have carved out a pleasant-enough living just about anywhere as long as he needn't worry for safety, harmony and the necessities of life.

Which is, of course, why the capricious winds of fate blew him straight into an intergalactic war – And for the first few days, he was all too busy alternating between urgent anxiety and sheer wonder to process much beyond the immediate moment... he was just glad that Shiro had been there to take over their ragtag little group and point them into some semblance of direction.

But once the initial panic and excitement were both beginning to wear off, he couldn't escape the realization that if he continued on the path that was currently before them, his life as he knew it would have come to an end, and no one could tell him when he might see the Earth or his family ever again, or indeed, if.

It wasn't as if he couldn't understand the appeals of this whole new world they'd found themselves in, this dreamlike wonderland of miraculous technology, alien beings, spiritual quests and combining giant robots, but there were dangers, too, and great sacrifices required of them, and he could see those, too; There was serious danger and discomfort involved here, and while the others may have had some drive or need that pushed them forward regardless, the same was not true for him –

Sure, he didn't want the empire to win and neither did he want his friends to get hurt while fighting them, in fact, he thought it would be a good thing if somebody stopped them, but it took a bit more than such a general wish for someone to drop everything they were doing and devote they whole life to a harsh struggle, especially without any guarantee that they would return home with it – many people would agree with helping the poor and have that affect their decisions as to what businesses they supported or how they voted, but only a small number of them would become full-time charity workers or activists, and even those laborious at at times turbulent occupations wouldn't have been as laborious as fighting an actual war when he'd been worrying about passing his exams at the Garrison and what sauces go with which vegetables.

But then, he saw what the Empire had been doing to the Balmera and its inhabitants... and he'd known, in an abstract, conceptual, intellectual way that they were just this horrible – after all, he'd been told that they'd used Shiro for nefarious experiments and human dogfights (humanfights?) and wiped out Allura's entire people, but hearing about it wasn't quite the same as knowing it, viscerally, in his bones, with the full implications of what it entailed, what such an oppressive regime actually meant in terms of an individual's life story and experiences.

He knew that such things had existed on earth, too, in the not too distant past, on a much smaller scale but no less in its viciousness – but that was before his time.

He hadn't lived it, never even imagined it outside the context of educational stories or the valiant tales of how it was changed, so those stories and dusty old history books had been the only context for him to understand what was really happening on all those conquered worlds.

He'd obviously recognized the immorality in it but that was nothing to the raw primal empathy he was bound to feel when he witnesses the suffering of actual, innocent people just as Shay, now that he could assign those great anonymous masses that populated the universe some familiar faces.

Perhaps, it was because he was more of a practical kind of person who trusted more in his concrete experience and five senses more than nebulous ideas, but actually seeing the Empire's policies with his own eyes changed everything.

Suddenly it was no longer a question of whether they could liberate the universe or why it had to be them, but of this unspeakable evil that could not be left unaddressed.

Something had to be done about it, and if he was one of the very few that were in a position to do something about it, how could he not?

He was an engineer, devoted to the real and measurable and realistic, and as such, he was too cautious to approach such a task with Lance's eager, wide-eyed openness or the boldness and excited speculations of a born theoretician like Pidge, nor did he have Shiro's experience and stoicism, let alone Keith's fearless nothing-to-lose attitude –

But even so, his heart told him that he needed to chose this path.

That was how he, Hunk Garrett, ordinary space cadet, became the Yellow Paladin.

And for all that there is to be said about the inertia of human habits and how hard their minds may find it to adapt to new surroundings, they were still capable of settling into a new status quo that they would then adapt to much like the old one, as if there had never been anything else.

Besides, when one lived their life from moment to moment, it wasn't hard to find little pockets of the familiar even after being flung across the universe – there was always some need for cooking, for example.

There were his friends, both old and new ones, and there were tons of interesting discoveries and cool technology-related problems to work out – His new role, their new tasks and most of all the people around him, they all became his new world, and though he still sometimes missed the life he had left behind, he had his hands full in the present, making sure his team was well-fed and not being tricked by suspicious characters.

 **V. (The Shadow Empress)**

"Picture a broomstick. You use it for a while, and then you replace the brush. Then, you replace the handle. Is it still the same broom?

\- No, but you can still swipe the floor with it."

….

The Emperor and his chief adviser were both very busy people.

They had always been, for as long as anybody could remember – His majesty, of course, had been both leader and figurehead since time immemorial; His propaganda styled him as a protector and keeper of order, a generic blank slate for the population to project upon and for their subjugated enemies to equate with pure, crushing power, and it was widely known that his reign had lasted for over 10000 years, but though no one quite knew what the deal was with the powerful sorceress that sneaked around in his shadows, no one could recall a time when she had not been there, nor could anyone name the definite moment in which she had won the great confidence which the emperor ostensibly placed in her.

Though he was, in reality, a man of is own ideas and designs that were not that hard to disagree with, his image as a strong military leader and the sheer authority he exuded ensured him the respect of what had always been a rather martial culture, even before he'd spent ages upon ages molding it into shape – she, however, this small, frail-looking, devious creature that wielded unholy power, was recognized as a vile thing even by the standards of the empire and nary anyone liked or trusted her.

There was little more than diffuse rumors about what went on in her laboratories, and even though she dressed in their robes, took a name in their tongue and looked... approximately like them, insofar as anyone could discern it, no one was really all that sure that she was truly one of them. There was no way to tell, with those hoods that she and her underlings never seemed to take off.

She was tolerated because the power she offered was undeniable – the empire would not have been able to expand as far it did if it weren't for her inventions, magics and experiments, and besides, no one dared to question the judgment of emperor Zarkon (not that he would have tolerated dissent, either), but no one liked having to rely on her, either.

Her presence was understood as a darkness, a necessary evil that, if it could not be questioned, should be ousted from its place by true strength – nonetheless, none among the many generations of generals had succeeded in taking her position as the Emperor's right hand.

Her position was absolute, and so, by extension, was her authority.

Her demands were to be followed without question; To invite her wrath was to receive a fate worse than death, and even if you didn't, she did not shy away from taking such unpopular duties as weeding out traitors and punishing failure, in addition to everything else she did; Sometimes there was very little that she didn't seem to be secretly in charge, except perhaps the military, which was instead manned with the sort of ambitious, seasoned individuals that would distrust her on the instinct.

For all the emperor's ruthless condemnation of weakness made for a good show of strenght, if one had been brought up to read it this way, no one really cared much for the specifics of just what she did with those unfortunates, and that brought with it a reputation much compounded by the sheer audacity of her deeds both large and subtle, from her tampering in god's domain to the subliminal brazenness of her undeserved station – Sure, she may have loyally and completely subordinated herself to his Majesty (for he could never tolerate any sort of equal or partner nor the faintest challenge to his authority, and any bridges that may eventually have lead to the contrary had been burned long, long ago) but once one looked past the deliberate way that she kept herself in the shadows, one could not help to be slightly unnerved or insulted, even if one could not consciously put together why; It was something about the way she would casually step into Zarkon's chambers at any hour, how she always seemed to trail three steps behind him, how he valued her word over anyone elses' (if not his own) –

The Emperor's patience was only for her.

She could say things to him that, were it anyone else, would have lead to their swift demises, and have him dignify it with an answer; They could be observed passing occult words and references to each other that nobody else seemed to understand, whispers of long swallowed world and bygone ages...

And most of all, it was the way she would stand before him, the way it held some pride, even bent and frail as she was, as if she were almost an equal – Almost, which was probably as close as it was possible for Zarkon to accept, but it was a boundary she observed out of respect, choice and knowledge of him, not out of fear.

Perhaps that was the frightening thing right here, that she served him because she wanted to, and could, just in theory, stop wanting, that she was actually reflected in his eyes when everything else in creation registered only as tools to achieve his purpose.

It was fortunate, then, that their purposes much overlapped and that their alliance had remained for many eons, but it called to mind the question of how they could have met and what it was that brought them together, but all anyone could do was wonder, for the Emperor and his court magician would not be questioned – No one could demand answers of Zarkon, and while the witch was not so well respected, she did nothing to labor away in her allot complexes, and spoke of nothing but results and potential and quintessence.

When one beheld her at her macabre handiwork, it seemed doubtful that she could have a past, or life, or even a thought outside of being this unholy nightmare being.

In the urgency of suffering and fear, the addled mind might be tempted to believe that she was as ancient as the void itself, and as corrupt as its blackest depths.

And besides, she didn't exactly share much about herself, ever the reclusive researcher plunging into yet deeper wells of shadow in the service of her emperor.

(The most mundane side effect of this was:) They were both very busy people – and they were very feared, too feared for anyone to consider that the answer might be nebulous even to themselves.

Because, here's the piece de resistance: They had both lived a long, long time, and though the people they once were may or may not see this differently (and if they would have, how did they end up going down these paths?), the thing with the passage of time was that it put things in context.

As a child, you might think next week's math test a big deal and see a good or bad grade as an event you would remember, but as you matured and gained more and more experience and knowledge, that moment and its supposed importance would lose their uniqueness and fade into the background, as you saw more, until it was only a footnote at best, or altogether unworthy of memory.

They knew what they did – he subjugated, the tinkered, their purpose power, limitless potential and endless knowledge.

She knew that there must have been something before, as a logical inevitability – she did not forget a single scientific fact or magical law, nor anything with a shred of strategical importance.

And she knew her purpose in the pursuit of the world's secrets – it was who she was, who she'd always been, what she did every day, the only significant kernel worth retaining through the ages.

She knew that she and Zarkon had once stumbled upon great power and potential and found themselves with the will and vision to grasp it – and that they had gone on to behold sights so radiant and vast that much of what they'd thought important before had been burn away like some ephemeral chrysalis, purifying them for transcendence...

Even so, she did not leave her Emperor's side.

Even so, she found herself chastising that unruly rebel prince, cautioning him not to repeat his parents' mistakes in pursuit of his many far-flung ideas.

 **VI. Pillar**

"Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.

After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water."

What is it that changed?

Well, sometimes Coran found it far easier to name the things that didn't change.

He'd been there from the very beginning; In his childhood, he watched as his grandfather laid the foundation for what would one day become the Castle of Lions.

In his youth, he witnessed the rise of the alliance as well as the turbulent political climates that had preceded them, he stood off to the side as the Paladins own old went about the glorious deeds that would forever engrave them in the mythologies of the space-faring community, and he was forced to watch as it all came crashing down, and once it came down to that darkest of hours, King Alfor found himself forced to select someone to watch over his daughter in case he didn't make it while he and his wife would fight and stand in defense of their people and homeland, even if their efforts were already doomed to be futile.

Coran himself had merely happened to be available, as one of the last brave defenders at the King's side, because, of course he was: He had always been loyal to the royal house and fully expected that battle to become his last stand, if the King had not required him to serve in a rather different capacity.

As it would turn out, that assignment would involve becoming one of the very last few survivors, remaining preserved in the ice in order to fling a light into the distant future – and there they were, properly flung, a once proud, pioneering culture reduced to a two-person society.

All things considered, "two" was still vastly better than one, which would have been below the minimum number necessary to maintain a conversation and observe regular decorum – The least thing he could do to repay his late King's trust in him was to devote himself as he always had.

For all the escapades of his youth, he was a man of his worth and the stiff upper lip, and he'd go down with this ship if need be.

But it was only when the Princess fell into the hands of Zarkon's forces that he became fully aware of how much he'd clung to these last grains of familiarity in order to go on, why he kept insisting on formal treatment for a girl who was no longer really a monarch of anything and bombarded the young Paladins with anecdotes of times long past and places that no longer existed;

Besides the obvious care that he'd have for someone he'd helped to look after since childhood, after having worked for her father since he was a Barchelor, there was also this dawning realization that this has been his way of keeping a tiny piece of his civilization... and how flimsy it all seemed without her, fragile, empty pretense devoid of the meaning that would be lost on everyone but him, and he'd feel himself being flooded by the awareness of all he'd lost, all he'd lived through, all he'd known and the people he'd spoken with, and how none of them existed anymore, including his friends and family, or even the keeper of his favorite antiques' shop back in the now-pulverized Altean capital.

Looking after the Princess, and continuing the mission of the Paladins had given him a sense of purpose, and a notion of legacy, of knowing that the dreams of the olden days had not completely gone to waste, if their fight was being continued today, and if he could do his best to help it succeed... but when faced with the possibility of losing the princess, and with her, both central pillars of what had remained of his life in this strange new aeon, the weight seemed almost too much to bear...-

Of course, the new Black Paladin had remained steadfast and determined in his intention to get her back as he would any member of his team, and even sought to comfort Coran himself, and that alone gave him hope:

Unlike his predecessor, this Black Paladin understood how every member of a team was important and worthy of anything from being listened to to being rescued. True to his calling, he knew that a tyrannical head could not stand lone without strong limbs to support him.

And perhaps that's why he and his comrades recovered the Princess safe and sound.

 **VII. (Coffin Birth)**

"When I was a child, I spoke as a child, thought as a child and felt as a child. Now, I have put childish things away."

According to a common proverb, and a commonly accepted piece of wisdom about most peoples of the known universe, it is good to be the king.

By extension, it could be said that it was also good to be the Prince, but only to an extent:

If one was well-versed in political theory, as any Prince should be, one understood that no man ruled alone: Even the most powerful warrior in the universe could not be everywhere at once, so even an absolute monarch or dictator required generals to fight their wars, police to enforce their laws, bureaucrats to collect the taxes – in short, allies who had thrown in their lots with him in hopes that their interests might be furthered.

The throne usually came with some sort of monopoly attached to it, unique access to power and resources, but in order to keep it, one needed to maintain control over those resources and distribute them so as to sustain one's reign – in particular, to reward one's followers with direct perks or favorable policies so they could not be swayed to support a rival.

It follows that for all their loyalty, your underlings – themselves in a position of power – must first look out to maintain their positions and interests before to maintain the power necessary in order to do what they want, including helping you.

On some level, they will be more attached to their "payments" themselves than they are to you. For a ruler to maintain power, then, they must assure their followers of a continued supply – but you cannot do that in case of your own incapacitation or existence failure.

Therefore, if one wants to prevent all-too ambitious underlings turning at the slightest whiff of weakness, you needed someone to be a potential successor, who could guarantee them more of the same even if you weren't around to dispense it.

In brief, the purpose of a heir was not just to ensure the stability of the ream after the ruler's death, but to cement the ruler's position while he was still alive.

That was, perhaps, the reason why the feared warrior emperor Zarkon chose to beget a son well into his reign, even though he had no intention of ever dying.

His heir was meant to be a figurehead, an insurance that his sprawling, incomprehensibly bloated empire would not fracture even in the unlikely event that he were to suffer defeat and to satisfy those who were not privy to all of his secrets.

As the sovereign of such a vast empire with a multitude of resources at his fingertips,the Emperor had many options, but perhaps due to some last vestiges of softer emotions, he would have no one but his wife-slash-vizier-slash-witch to do him the honor, though the results were nonetheless more preternatural than wholesome and probably required her to spend some hours in the lab regardless, just so ensure that her wispy, withered body would even be capable of such a thing.

The resulting fetus spent a few phoebs being concealed under her robes, until it was ready to see the light of day, and then, the small Prince was presented to the masses with no further explanation as to how he existed.

It was not uncommon for the scions of nobility to be raised by attendants but even by the standard of royalty, his parents were busy. His father would not permit displays of weakness and his mother, so involved in her research that one sometimes wondered if she even recalled that there was a world outside of it, did not officially exist, though he saw her often enough, given how she followed her emperor like a nebulous shadow.

They may not have chosen to procreate, were it not in the interest of the realm, and to avoid having to go through the whole charade again every couple of centuries, they took certain... precautions.

Lotor was too young to understand what had been done to him; It was one of the many decision they had taken on his behalf ever since he was born, one of the many things they decided he had to suffer through without giving him an explanation.

There was much that was decided for him, he had a role to play and his father had an opinion on how it was to be played, laid out before they even set upon conceiving him.

Wedged in between economy lessons and sword practice, the young Prince did not give the ritual much thought and barely retained any memory of the event; From what he could imagine, it could have felt intoxicating or it could have burnt like fire, but he simply didn't recall – it's significance didn't sink in until centuries later – as a youth, he'd often been sent to attend official functions and, in the process, had met with the offspring of high-ranking generals and functionaries, the few that would have been influential enough to be graced by the imperial family's presence.

But as time passed, Lotor saw them mature, advance and sometimes even start families of their own while he still looked no different than he did on the day he came of age.

They knew better than to question it, just like no one ever asked an explanations of his parents (and why would they, considering that his father made a habit of flat-out murdering anyone who talked back to him on his off days) – it was Lotor himself who couldn't shake the jarred sense of disconnect and dissatisfaction as he found himself still full of futile thoughts of proving himself and finding a place when everyone else was moving on to building and maintaining their hold on life...

When he confronted the witch (for the could be no confronting the Emperor), she was quite blasé about it. Of course they'd altered him, just like she did it with what could be considered the family pet.

Not like herself and his father, however – that, she simply told him, wasn't even possible, the means had been lost. And that's all she told him.

Even if they did have the means, would they allow for Lotor to be as powerful as themselves? If he was, they would have to listen to him, properly look him in the eye as a fellow man, and would his father tolerate it?

Could he procure the means, and make them?

Surely they could not expect him to remain an ignorant youth forever. Had they thought that a creature born from such a warped union as their own would be so empty as to never ask questions, or want to go his own path?

Eventually, he learned to let time breeze by without growing too attached to transient things, as, he presumed his parents had done, but his displeasure remained, grew, even, as the meaningless and frivolous pleasures his station allowed him started to bore him.

With time, the not-so-young prince never meant to be king grew sullen.

He observed. He studied. He came to understand things, and have his own views on them, to know his limits – He'd know he's discovered another part of what was distinctly himself when he drew all of their disapproving glares.

His father would simply reprimand him and state what was no longer to take place as if he were declaring the one and only truth, and it infuriated the prince to no end. If there were witnesses, they would shudder and flinch instinctively – anyone other than the Emperor's wife and son would lose their heads for this and even here, he didn't like his patience tried.

It suited Lotor; Every time he wasn't cut down in an instant, he would know that he was, at least, slightly more than an insect or at the very least an annoyance being reflected in his father's eyes.

The witch wasn't as explosive, perhaps even reasonable, but everything as much of a solid wall.

In a sense she was much worse, because of how completely implacable she seemed.

He could play people like fiddles in these days, but she always eluded him like some fugacious mist, but she knew him, enough to throw it in his face but for all she knew, she never understood.

She'd explain to him what he was to do, chiefly, not to provoke his father, that he simply did not tolerate questions and never had, even from his closest friends.

Lotor wondered in what strange, faraway eon his father ever had close friends; He could surely picture how they ended.

According to her, he just needed to understand that, and then, he could fill his place in his father's designs and partake in their glory.

And there had been days, in his youth, when he'd been comforted by the thought that his father had plans for him. But that was before he had plans of his own, before each passing day left him incensed with trampled pride and thwarted ambition.

His wanting heart burned hot in his chest and would not be silenced.

And with that, it was only a matter of time until he questioned his father one time to many.

"Out of my sight."

"But-"

"Out. Of. My. Sight."

And with that, it was done.

They still needed a heir apparent, of course, but he could well serve this purpose at the edges of the empire, supposedly, conquering.

His mother admonished him dispassionately, telling him to make a learning opportunity out of this, to bring back an apology along with a handful of conquered planets so that things could continue down their allotted path...as if she didn't register or comprehend the magnitude of what had just transpired, blind to the slighted, resentful brewing within him, his desperation to be seen and acknowledged for once-

But Lotor no longer expected it, not from them. And perhaps that sentiment had made him careless, or rather, indifferent to bringing the final blow upon himself sooner rather than later.

If his father was expecting him to come back begging on his knees, he would wait a long time.

There was more for him out in the void than there was on the command ship.

He would go and seek it.

Perhaps, though he would never admit it, there had been some part of him that had for as simple a wish as to be like his parents, to measure up to them, to prove himself to be just as worthy as them -

But the truth was, he wasn't like them, and they would not allow him to be, even if it were within his capacity. Fine, he told himself. He was not his father. He didn't want to be. He would gain power in his own way.

And with that intention in mind, he disappeared into the recesses of the cosmos.

So when he heard, much much later, of his father's defeat and how he was to come to his side and take the reins of the empire, he felt a great many things, complicated things, many, but not all of them positive in nature.

But he wasn't listening nor tuned in to any of that. I wasn't relevant what he felt, and in the instants after receiving the news, neither gloating nor mourning, but diverting all his attention to his racing mind, considering plans and weighing scenarios against each other.

There might be no other chance like this, not for eons, maybe not ever. It might well be the only chance he would get, and he'd be damned if he didn't take it.

 **VIII. (Beast and Beauty)**

"I'm not sure if this me can do it.

I might be able to do what they ask of me, but in order to do that, I think I'd have to destroy myself."

….

He tried, he tried, he really did.

He tried, just like he did back at the garrison, when Shiro took him under his wing and made him believe that he could be like him.

He'd joined on a split-second whim or perhaps an inkling of a premonition he couldn't explain, just like he decided everything in his life, and before long, he found himself trapped in yet another repetition of them same patterns he encountered everywhere.

Hothead. Problem child. Weirdo.

People flinching away as he passed and hands that could only destroy, sparks of rage coming awake and the endless days of feeling like a caged beast.

He didn't think he belonged here and neither did anyone else, but there was, at the time, not a single place in the world where he did belong. He was looking for a sense of purpose, somewhere to channel all of this energy that he didn't know what to do with -

And there was one thing that made him feel like he made have hope, finally, finally, something he was good at that wasn't picking fights or being alone.

He was an unruly brat no one wanted to deal with, but he was a good pilot, and to be honest, he didn't even care about 'good' or 'gifted'; Hearing his own name in combination with such words had never felt real.

But it was something he could do, something he knew and understood how to do when so much else eluded him.

Up in the air, there was only himself and the lightness, like fleeting tastes of infinite freedom; The only time the world made sense was when he was piercing above the clouds, cutting through the void, feeling the acceleration in his bones; There was never a point to his being here nor an explanation for how he came to be, unless he was chasing the speed down a nose dive, heart racing, blood pumping, all his being engulfed in a blaze and required neither thought nor justification.

Up in the air, he was all but self-explanatory.

That was, perhaps, his saving grace, the sole redeeming feature that had given the instructors the brief and passing impression that there was something there worth salvaging and led them to introduce him to Shiro. It was only intended as a means to keep him in line, in effect, a carrot to be dangled in front of his face, and if had stayed at that, he would have disdained it, but Shiro did way more than that.

To this day, he didn't quite know what could have possessed an experienced, accomplished, prim-and-proper veteran space explorer to think that they were somehow alike, but there was something that Shiro seemed to have seen in him, something beyond a bothersome sullen youth or an asset to be harnessed, and for the first time since his father passed away, there was someone who actually tried to understand him.

Someone who listened and offered him guidance, who believed in him and told him that he could be something grand one day, if only he could learn, as everyone needs to at first.

As far as the young vagrant was concerned, Shiro was a hero, and he was nothing like that, but even someone like him wouldn't want to disappoint the person he admired.

So he went along with it, never quite convinced that this could be his reality, treading softly, but moving forward all the same, or so he was being told.

In truth, he felt uncertain. Every shadow of a setback made him doubt if he'd ever proceeded at all, and though he knew that not all progress was external and bristled at the imposition of measurable goalposts as if there were one true way to do it, the lack of tangible markers left him doubting again and again whether he could truly claim to have changed.

He wasn't ever really sure what he was doing...

And then, he got the news about the Kerberos mission, and he was devastated, and what's worse, he had to keep going, day in, day out, as if nothing had really changed. Eat, train, sleep,

The one person who would normally comfort him and tell him what to do was precisely the one he might never seen again, and though he understood that Shiro would be the first one to tell him to keep going and, what more, let his success be his legacy, it was just harder and harder to see a point to any of this, and he just felt the tension and dissonance building inside him like the sticky, consuming heat of sickly stagnant midsummer noon, dripping down his nerve cords and spelling disaster.

And the greatest irony was, that he could actually be quite stoic and detached, even to a fault, when he was actually thinking and making conscious decisions instead of just reacting, following his senses from one moment to the next in a series of automatic kneejerks.

The same swiftness that made him a natural fighter and a brilliant flier left him standing before a heap of dust and rubble, a chaos of his own creation which he could no longer undo the work of years erased in the rage of a minute, gone with his errant hopes.

He'd thought that he'd changed, but in the end, absolutely nothing had.

Lost, adrift, and no longer quite as used to it, he went back to his father's old shack. He never had the heart to fully part with this place, at first, because he'd still hoped that his mother might return, just like his father always used to say she would, but he no longer believed such fairytales.

In all likelihood, she was gone, too, or worse: She never cared enough to come back.

But even so, this place was all he had in terms of an anchor and there were many memories stored away in its crevices, enough to give it a metaphysical, liminal quality when the only one who was ever here was himself, a lone dot in this huge desert, and he existed like some solitary lizard-creature stalking its territory, sustaining itself as its instincts demanded.

In a sense, it suited him more than anything else ever did -

He liked the quiet and excelled at the reptilian calculations of survival.

But all the while, there was another part of him that was withering, longing for a sense of purpose and dreaming its days away in the absence of one, watching the cacti go and sensing the time passing, listening into the universe for whatever calling might still have left for him – And call it did, up to the stars and away from all he'd known.

With little left for him on Earth, he was one of the least reluctant to leave it all behind forever and commit himself to his new purpose as a Paladin of Voltron, doubting that he would ever return even if he were to live through the struggles.

He was well aware that it could end through some wist of faith and no longer entertained any naïve hopes that he might change all the ways he'd been living. But it was nice to have Shiro back with him, and though he always remained an island onto himself even beside the tightly-knit brotherhood which the quickly turned into, he was, by necessity, at least somewhat part of their group, and that was... nice.

Even so, he never expected it to last, and he thought the time to part might have come when he suspected that he might be reason their location kept being discovered.

Allura came simply in her battle suit. He was going to leave with a bag of his belongings and if she had not been with him, he may have never returned, and perhaps gone on to eke out a living somewhere else far, far away.

But even then, Shiro had already spoken to him of that horrible thing. The prospect of replacing him, as if anyone ever could.

He pushed that thought far, far down to the depths in which his nightmares lurked and concentrated on just making things work in the present moment, especially as their confrontation with Zarkon drew nearer and other issues occupied his mind.

For example: He'd always thought that he'd stuck out somewhat, that he never quite fit in, always stood apart and found himself just a little out of sync with just about everyone else more often than not.

But, these kinds of things happened. They weren't all that much out of the ordinary in and of themselves... or so he thought.

The last thing he ever wanted to hear was that he truly was unlike everyone else, some kind of being that had never existed before – just how many things that he had merely seen as simple quirks of his were, in actuality, heralding the presence of something not quite human, something taintedwhose mere mention struck fear into the denizens of the universe?

Was it that what had always kept the others at a distance, as if they had sensed that he was something to be avoided?

He was usually the sort to fall asleep quickly just about anywhere with no frills or fancies, but the torment of these thoughts kept him awake in the silence, when he had nothing else to focus on. He realized soon that he wouldn't have peace until he pursued all this to its logical conclusion.

He didn't know what he'd expected to find at the Blade of Marmora's headquarters – some part of him was probably awaiting the final, conclusive pronouncement that he was nothing but a troublemaker after all, or somehow rotten in some fundamental way.

What he actually found was very different in nature, and not very much at all, certainly not worth being pinned down with all those stares that ranged between curious to hostile, even though he was still the very same hopeless case, still not changed at all, and all the more uncertain of what that immutable something he was stuck being actually was at a time when everyone he might have looked to for a hint on that was acting all weird around him.

He wasn't sure what he'd done if Shiro had not been there to support him, Shiro, who, despite all he'd suffered at the clawed hands of Zarkon and his lackeys, never treated him any different, took the time to offer him support and, if anything, stuck closer to him after learning of both his history and the depth of the admiration he'd always held for him, and again, he felt reminded just how lost they would all be without Shiro's guidance and leadership, even if he didn't fully realize it.

Then, just as the others were coming around to him, just as even Allura seemed able to look past their differences, right when they neared their greatest victory himself and he found himself able to even find a little pride in his role as one of the Blade of Marmora, the worst of his nightmares came true and blew all the petty personal concerns he'd dealt with before clean out of the water.

It was like he was right back at the garrison, when he got the news about the Kerberos mission, except this time, he couldn't afford to smash everything and run, because dumped here in his lap were the lives of his four remaining teammates, and it was up to him whether they would all live or die in the face of the new threat embodied by Prince Lotor.

He refused to believehen his searches turned up nothing time and time again. He wouldn't hear when Allura proclaimed the need to find Shiro's successor. He whimpered and begged when the Black Lion mercilessly whirred to life all around him.

He also did a lot of frustrated growling in these days. He felt more restrained and trapped than he ever had in his life, like some caged wild thing which he couldn't afford to be with all this responsibility bearing down on his shoulders.

When it was just him, the only thing at stake was his own life, and he could do with that whatever he wanted, it was his to risk after all.

He could take gambles and chase his intuitions; Sometimes it didn't work, but a lot of times it did, at least to the extent of serving their purpose. He took it upon himself to do the things nobody else would dare and follow the leads that nobody else would notice.

But with everyone else tailing after him, he couldn't do that. His senses blared at him about the opportunities that went unheeded as his white-knuckled hands clung to the Black lion's controls.

Besides, he was used to making decisions on his own, often on very short notice.

That, too, had been more or less fine with Shiro there to do the planning, but you couldn't have the person in charge just doing whatever without making use of everyone else's inputs and contributions.

He knew that, but his modus operandi so far was to act based on gut feelings, heuristics and policies honed and practiced for a completely different sense of circumstances.

Everytime he felt like he might be getting the hang of it and allowed himself a moment of confidence, there would be another dangerous setback blowing up in his face, and that of everyone else, to boot.

He wasn't sure what he would have done if it hadn't been for the support, insight and resilience of Lance and Allura – most likely, something he would have regretted forever.

If only he could do the same for them – Try as he might (and he really did), he didn't have Shiro's gift for comforting people. Most of the time he barely understood them.

If anything, it was him who ended up needing the comforting... what sort of leader what he even supposed to be?

But in the end, it was not a question of the 'best' plot for the Black Lion (that would always be Shiro) but of the 'least worse'.

He was reluctant to accept the need for it at first, because it had felt tantamount to forgetting about Shiro, but ultimately he understood that this was a war and they had to keep fighting, even if they were forced to do so screaming and bleeding, so he pushed onwards, perhaps too hard, but he could barely tell the difference – any degree of doing this was too hard for him:

Living up to this task essentially required him to become as unlike himself as he possibly could. They had once been an unit, used and accustomed to functioning one way, and now they were staggering and careening, forcefully squeezed into a different shape and forced to keep going, far from the instant elegant match of their previous positions.

And of course, Lance and Allura struggled at first and were thrown about like pinballs with precious little dignity, but they were nothing if not adaptable and in the end, it was the Princess' sheer stubborn resilience that kept them afloat after his blunder on Thayserix.

He pushed for them to try forming voltron once again because he had to, but he couldn't have found the words to describe his inward relief when it actually worked.

They limped away with their lives as the heir to the Galra Empire eluded their grasp, and not for the last time, for he would proceeded to make fools of them (and Keith in particular) each time their paths crossed, to the point that they might as well have been ineffectual old-timesy cartoon villains trying to nail him with various ACME products.

Keith never saw his face (though the sound of his voice on the intercom led him to suggest that his was a very punchable visage indeed) but he could infer some things about him from the way he fought.

Just the thought of him left him riled up like a shark smelling blood, baring grit teeth at the ease with which he made them play into their hands – here he was, also recently ascended, also a prodigy at flying, and Keith didn't doubt that his in-person fighting style must be much the same.

Everything about it seemed designed to frustrate the enemy, to let them wear themselves out while expending as little effort as possible... and he had guts to face them all on his own in this little fragile fighter that they had nonetheless failed to shoot down.

It was almost the kind of thing Keith himself might have done, and yet, it wasn't, not quite:

Here was someone who had also focused on speed and agility, someone who understood not to let an opportunity pass and not to let go when they had the figurative tiger by the tail, but where Keith was blunt and forceful, Lotor was elegant and measured, and where the Red Paladin was full of doubt and ever struggling to fill his predecessors' footsteps, Lotor was versatile, ressourceful and confident in his own ways of doing things.

Keith thought he was confident too, once, not with people perhaps but certainly about his decisions and the things he was doing, but it seemed so, so long ago even if only a few short months had passed since Shiro's disappearance.

Any faith he might ever have had in himself or at least in his abilities, any joy he might have derived from doing what he was good at had long since crumbled away under the weight of these terrible burdens, and always, he felt his body quaking with the urge to charge ahead and leap onto action, nothing but tension he was forced to restrain, and always, always this fire rising through his being – He thought he'd found an use top channel it towards when he fought his way to the Red Lion, but since he took over the Black one, it was even more of a liability than it had ever been.

He was a liability.

Had he ever done any single thing right in his life?

It was hard to say.

He kept making suggestions only for the others to shoot them down for obvious reasons.

It wouldn't be the first time that he tried to 'change his evil ways' with nothing coming of it.

Even so, he had to try, because there was no other choice.

If this role was to consume him, then so be it – If there was one quality that had lead Shiro to chose him, then it was that he understood that the mission was more important than any one of them, especially himself.

That had to be enough.

In the end, he adapted some, and this was never more apparent than when Shinro returned.

It should have been the joy of all joys and the sweetest release – despite everything, he always hoped that Shiro might come back, pat him on the back and take back his old place, right where he belonged.

But that was not what happened, and their first operation as a reunited team was a mess fraught with screeching discord and too many cooks spoiling the broth.

Having Shiro's support back should have been a relief, but it wasn't;

Painfully, haphazardly and bumping his head at every step of the way, Keith had learned to step up first and explain the course of action, to be the first to consider which direction to go – if he hadn't, they would not have survived.

He'd thought this was a good thing, that he was finally getting the hang of it, but once Shiro was back to actually see and supervise it, it would turn out that he had been doing everything wrong at every step of the way.

There was one difference between himself and Shiro that he had never considered because it had, at most a neutral impact in terms of leadership abilities, but now, it ended up being all too crucial – Shiro was a planner while Keith was an improviser.

And the team could not do both at once.

Predictably, obviously, the rest of the team chose to follow Shiro's proposed course of action, and each time, they wasted precious time having a discussion and the end of it, Keith usually felt stupid for even opening his mouth, well aware of the hot frustration surging n his chest, pushing it down with ferocity yet still struggling to focus and see clear...

And sure, Shiro dutifully comforted him afterwards, even throwing in some praise for his haphazard, begrudging saving throw, but if anything, that only highlighted the wide gulf between them and how Keith would never measure up... a dreadful thought now that he might be stuck as the head of Voltron for good.

He thought he had it under control... the situation, the team, himself, but that may just have been a convenient lie he told himself to make do in Shiro's absence.

Rather than comforted, he felt once again thrown back to his days at the garrison, or rather, the day it all ended, the day he'd been forced to realize that he hadn't been able to change at all, even with Shiro believing in him... or the whole team supporting him, in this case.

He just. Could. Not. Stop. Messing it all up, couldn't seem to move past any of his limitations though they were much simpler than what some of his teammates had to deal with.

And he was growing really damn tired of it, tired of being stuck, positively sick of always being the troublesome problem child, but even though he tried and tried and did his best and pushed himself to the point of disintegration, he simply couldn't help it.

He really wished they'd quit doing it, Shiro, and Lance, and all of the others.

They ought to stop making him feel like he could be anything else than this, or trying to convince him that he could change or something.

He was tired of that more than anything else.

 **IX. (Brave little Taylor)**

"I was able to do this because I became you.

So, you should be able to become me."

….

So what of him?

The Sixth Paladin. The other one.

The one that didn't have any obvious, outstanding characteristics that were immediately apparent, apart from trying far too hard to stand out.

He had some ideas of what he'd like to be considered but nothing really came of it. The spot of the ace pilot was already taken, the ice puns were a bit trite, and how often do you really come across a suitable job for aquaman?

He really liked the idea of being the cool Ninja Sharpshooter, but that never caught on, and what the point of a 'reputation' that only he believed in? It was rather pathetic really.

And it was hard to say where he was going when he was sure where to start with; in front of an audience, Lance could almost convince himself that he was the coolest thing since sliced bread, but when he was all by himself, everything was called into question and with no one to reflect or see a particular impression of himself reflected back from, he couldn't make heads or tails of his reflection in the mirror, and he began doubting whether there was very much there to see at all.

He was always waiting for a possible moment to make is own, aimlessly reaching out in many directions where others seemed to follow a clear path, and increasingly beginning to wonder whether he was ever going to get anywhere.

Sometimes, he felt as amorphous as the water of a river that flowed down the past of least resistance, never acquiring a shape of its own; On some days, he even thought he might be as insignificant a single grain of sand on a seashore.

All he'd ever wanted was to be someone, a simple dream hatched on a sunny day; His brothers and sisters had all gone out into the world, done amazing things and made their mom proud, and so it figured that he, too, should one day bring home the spoils of great deeds, but that was far easier than done in this big world, especially now that he was so far away from everything he had ever known.

Perhaps spending his childhood being coddled and looked for by his loving family had led him to see the world as a simpler, friendlier place than it was, and the more he came to realize that saving the universe wasn't a game to be won, the more he wondered if he had something real to contribute.

At home, he might have been a big fish in a small pond, but now that he'd been thrown into the biggest imaginable pond - the ocean of stars itself – his accomplishments and ambitions were looking punier by the day. All he'd wanted was to be liked and admired and celebrated, like his siblings has been, the bigger the better.

It was one thing to be the fun and silly little brother, but another to be termed the designated goofball on a team that was expected to save the universe – what does a troupe of sci-fi warriors even need a jester for?

It was not just that he wanted to be wanted or needed (though that was certainly where he started), but that he increasingly understood the severity of what they were dealing with, that there wasn't any room, even for such simple dreams, particularly them, especially if they hang in doubt, yet doubtlessly are what fuels or smothers the seasons of his heart -

And it's hard to say where he's going and what he's coming to if he's not even certain what he's working with and where the path lies, or how to make sure

But it's not always easy to see a revolution coming, to tell what might simply be a cold day from the onset of winter.

Perhaps it is impossible to tell, because we are not fully created until those moments where we chose to take an action with the potential to define us.

When the Black Lion made its choice and its frayed chosen refused the call, Lance was not looking out for his own betterment or even noticed the stumped and worried glances being exchanged behind him, nor the almost palpable sense of absence since this, too, was one of the things Shiro used to take care of -

He simply stepped forward without thinking much at all, reaching out his hand in a simple gesture of comfort.

Allura realizes it's significance the moment she hears the Red Lion's roars; And as for Keith, he cannot think of it being otherwise when Lance seeks his comfort some time later, still unaware.


End file.
